Book Description: 

Pinocchio has been a leitmotif in Ezio Gribaudo's artwork over the decades. Since the 1950s, the artist has incorporated Carlo Collodi's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio into his works, with frequent thematic references that have evolved along with the artist's own development of the main character. This volume captures the universality of Pinocchio, which Gribaudo proposes here in the shape of a silhouette that evokes the collective myth of childhood. In so doing, Gribaudo illustrates Collodi's puppet as a representation mediated by the relationship between text and image, a subject transferred from being a literary instrument to an artistic one, spawning symbols and icons.

Trained at the Accademia di Brera and as an architect, Ezio Gribaudo brings to his visionary art a distinctive sense of chromatic precision and historical determination that derive from his work as a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. His award-winning production has been recognized with various international prizes, among which the IX Rome Quadriennale in 1965, the XXXIII Venice Biennale Prize in 1966, and the São Paulo Biennale in 1967. His work has been shown internationally and is included in the permanent collections of many museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, among others.

Author Bio: 

Victoria Surliuga is Associate Professor of Italian Studies, Italian Program Coordinator and World Cinema Coordinator at Texas Tech University. She is a scholar of modern and contemporary Italian art, cinema, and literature, as well as a poet and a translator. She was awarded The 1905 Fellowship of the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association for her research on Peggy Guggenheim and art patronage, a grant to the Italian Program at Texas Tech University from the CH Foundation to curate the exhibition Ezio Gribaudo's Theaters of Memory at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (2016), Scholarship Catalyst Grants from Texas Tech University, and was Humanities Fellow at the Humanities Center of Texas Tech University. 

Her publications include Homage to Ezio Gribaudo / Omaggio a Ezio Gribaudo (E-book published in the Texas Tech University DSpace Open Repositories. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Libraries and Venezia: ytali.com, 2020), Ezio Gribaudo: My Pinocchio (Pistoia: Edizioni Gli Ori, 2017), Ezio Gribaudo: The Man in the Middle of Modernism (New York-London: Glitterati, 2016; First Place President's Faculty Book Award, Texas Tech University, for 2017-2018), a book-length volume of translations of Giampiero Neri's poetry Natural Theater: Selected Poems (1976-2009) (Edition and Introduction; New York: Chelsea Editions, 2010), Nell'epoca del gremito: Conversazioni con Giancarlo Majorino (Milano: Edizioni Archivi del ‘900, 2008), and Uno sguardo sulla realtà: L'opera poetica di Giampiero Neri (Novi Ligure: Joker Edizioni, 2005).

She has also written on poetry and painting in Giambattista Marino, on Federico Fellini, on the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, Franco Loi, Giancarlo Majorino, and Giampiero Neri. She has authored six books of poems, of which the most recent one is Shadow (Las Cruces: Xenos Books, with Chelsea Editions and the Raiziss-Giop Foundation, 2018).

Victoria Surliuga Biography